I've been using Brave as primary for years. At this point I'd pay for a license if it were necessary. Frankly that would be an improvement: if it's free, you're the product. Brave just monetizes you differently.

I no longer argue with the legion of Brave haters. I've decided they're a benefit: the more people that don't use Brave the less likely Google et al. will be compelled to destroy it.

Replace "Chrome" with "Internet Explorer" and we're back to 1999.

This is not how it works. The mechanism is about allowing a cluster of websites to choose a single first party domain and have all of them share cookies together, not sharing arbitrary cookie from arbitrary domain, otherwise it would create loopholes in connected components that bring back the downsides of third-party cookies. What you mentioned should be done using SSO.

After thinking about it a bit more, I have a clearer picture of how it should work in my mind:

* All cookies are double-keyed: the primary key is the origin of the top-level page and the secondary key is the origin of the page that sets the cookie, just like how partitioned cookies work right now.

* stackoverflow.com uses a header, meta tag or script to request changing its primary key domain to “stackexchange.com”

* The browser makes a request to https://stackexchange.com/domains.txt and make sure that “stackoverflow.com” is in the list, authorising this first-party domain change

* When the user agrees to the change, the page is reloaded with stackexchange.com as the primary key, thus stackoverflow.com can obtain login details from stackexchange.com via CORS or cross site cookies.

* A side effect is that all cookies and state are lost when switching the first-party domain. Should stackoverflow.com be acquired by a new owner, say x.com and changes its first-party domain to x.com, all cookies on stackoverflow.com are lost and the user will have to login on x.com again, maybe using credentials from stackexchange.com. It’s unfortunate but it works around the issues mentioned in the post in a clean way, avoiding loopholes that transfer cookies by switching the first-party domain frequently.

Way more than just two chromium browsers in existence.

Mozilla is a husk of what it could have been, and that's hurt Firefox.

ZIP codes contain maybe 40K residents [0] (many contain fewer) and there have been around 25K days in the last 70 years. Sure births are not evenly distributed, but still...

[0] https://www.unitedstateszipcodes.org/images/comparison-of-po...

* side tabs, I would say, the tab is a horizontal extension of the page, so they're horizontal tabs, right?

FWIW the about section says this: "Each privacy test examines whether the browser, on default settings, protects against a specific kind of data leak."

The maintainer is a Brave employee and this is a project they were already doing before joining Brave. I'm hoping that they aren't manipulating it in favor of Brave.

I sent those three options as a feature request. Do you think the site is still useful in some capacity?

Submitting your website to a list controlled by some arbitrary website on the Internet is very much different from serving some kind of metadata to visitors that their browsers interpret.

Also the approval process existing does matter. Under a normal situation when you serve some kind of metadata (like what sites you are "related" to) there is no "approval" process to who gets to serve this kind of metadata and who doesn't.

The tools to do this the right way exist in so many different ways.

There is a risk that it ends up like cookie banners, and the adtech industry manages to brainwash the world into thinking that the government is the bad guy and they just want some harmless data to share with their 1,345 best friends and they are “forced” to show these. Despite there being no requirement at all to track data, and they break the law with it anyway so why bother.

To clarify: your date of birth includes the year. It’s more specific than your birthday, which we usually think of as just day & month.

87% of the time, there are no others on my birthdate or there is one other and opposite gender.

13% of the time is 1 same gender or more of either or both.

They are making their own solution for vertical tabs.

You are free to install addons.

What is the issue?

Don't just make these snipe driveby comments.

Most people were never worried, and probably will never be worried, with the points you're listing there. That's not to say they've stopped hating browser monopolies, just maybe not your definition of what a browser monopoly is or why they're problematic.

In general (not just browsers) most people treat "popularity" and "monopoly" as completely orthogonal concepts. I.e. something unpopular can still be a monopoly, something with 99% usage can still not be a monopoly. There is typically just a tendency for extremely popular things to also happen to be a monopoly.

I'd like Firefox to stick around, but as far as I'm concerned, if Safari goes away, I couldn't care less.

What they haven't done before is spend a fortune buying up an ad-tech start up. They barely even bother to maintain a pretense that they care about Firefox users. They basically came right out and said "We know that users don't want this, we can't convince them to, so we were right to force it on them by default and just hope most people don't notice and start complaining" (https://cdn.adtidy.org/blog/new/2wffyscreen_mozilla.png?mw=1...)

- $120-140k, hetero, white, 190-220 lb, broadly Christian.

- $137,500/y, prefers tall redhead females, Irishman originally from Cork, 197 lb, observant Catholic.

The first one is too unspecific, while the second could suffice to identify a particular person in a neighborhood.

What makes a butter knife safe is not that it's completely devoid of an edge, but that its edge is sufficiently blunt.

Though regardless of that, Related web sites (or whatever that set is currently called) does present a hole in that logic. It was originally meant to allow sites with different domains to share cookies/storage (like google.com and google.co.uk). From what it sounds like, bad actors are using it in the expected ways. There were supposed to be mechanisms to prevent this, but it seems like they failed in this case.

The list is in a public repository however, so Brave could have filled issues and a pull request to address the issue. Instead they decided to stage a meaningless survey and declare Chrome a threat to people everywhere.

It gives no benefits to end users. Ad companies will not stop using old methods, they will just add one more method.

I hope responsible Linux distributions will patch this out and disable by default.

A fair model would be if this feature was opt-in and if Mozilla paid to the users who enabled it.

> The purpose of this API is to provide a privacy-first design for advertising companies to be able to measure how advertising drives conversions. That is, answering the question of whether advertising effectively achieves its goals, such as increased sales.

Not my problem. I don't earn anything from their sales.

Firefox is rock solid, open-source, backed by a great organization (which has recently reinvested additional resources in it) and a joy to use imo. Also, the levels of vitriol that even the slightest bit of anonymous telemetry incurs is unhelpful and I encourage people who hold that viewpoint to really interrogate it.

Right now is actually Safari that prevents it, like it or not. Especially iOS one where users have to use it. Firefox is rounding error in this fight.

The implementation is just FLoC/Topics API all over again and it's still not compelling. The first kick in the teeth comes right at the start where the entire thing is predicated on data gathered from having an ad shoved in your face.

> At impression time, information about an advertisement is saved by the browser in a write-only store. This includes an identifier for the ad and whether this was an ad view or an ad click.

I do not want ads. Ever. Like many (likely most) firefox users, I go to some lengths to prevent them from showing up in any form. Now that firefox is going to be profiting directly off of firefox users seeing and clicking on ads they will certainly degrade our ability to prevent them.

It then involves sending my data to third parties so that it can be aggregated. Then my browsing has to be monitored to identify conversion events. None of this is acceptable.

Here's what their Cookie Monster paper says:

> User perspective. Ann browses various publisher sites that provide content she is interested in, such as nytimes.com and facebook.com. Ann does not mind seeing relevant advertising, understanding that it funds the free content she enjoys.

I am not Ann. I very much mind seeing advertising, relevant or not. I do not understand that if funds "free content" I enjoy. If I need to be exploited to pay for something, that thing it isn't "free" and if it's infested with ads I do not enjoy it. The entire thing is based on a fantasy where users find this acceptable. We don't and it isn't. If we did, we'd probably all just be using chrome.

> FF is currently a key tool in the fight to avoid a Google-top-to-bottom future

Why should we care if Firefox isn't Google if both are just going to exploit us?

Could you elaborate?

(I know next to nothing about Brave, so I may not be aware of obvious examples)

Add this to /etc/hosts

    0.0.0.0 www.google-analytics.com
    0.0.0.0 google-analytics.com
    0.0.0.0 ssl.google-analytics.com

Easily said, until it's your bank, or a government entity, or the electric company, or any of the thousands of other entities that have started blocking Firefox.

Firefox should really camouflage its user agent, or make it trivial to do so.

Anectodal one: I liked it.

These are the primary issues I hear about regarding Brave on this forum.

It's also founded by Brendan Eich who was forced out of Mozilla for his strong and vocal opposition of same-sex marriage. I tend to be a bit idealistic, but this is a strong reason for me to avoid Brave, especially when they are injecting content into pages.

Assuming that's true, it seems to waste everyone's time and bits to fake it instead of just not answering or a minimal denial.

Safari is funded ENTIRELY by Google's ads, also making a profit, and this is a fact. We can entertain a counterfactual, maybe Safari would still be funded without Google funding it with billions, but that's not the world we live in today.

And given Apple's reluctance to advance the web, going against their other cash cows, it's disingenuous to suggest otherwise. I recommend reading this opinion: https://infrequently.org/2022/06/apple-is-not-defending-brow...

I also want to be able to use the same browser at work as at home, and my workplace banned the use of Brave when it started including a VPN.

I have one internal corporate site which won’t work with Firefox for some reason, but never had any problems elsewhere.

its interesting that authority is in UK, but they pushed Google to abandon effort globally.

> For the rest of us, "Just stop doing it on the web" would be a pretty substantial lifestyle change

It really isn't, though, at least not for most people I know who aren't into tech. It would certainly mean changing some habits, which is often hard, but (at least in the US) it means giving up a relatively small amount of convenience, not a substantial lifestyle change.

Mozilla went hardcore political and Chrome copycat long after his time. There was no such controversy there under Eich, and even now as Brave's CEO he isn't doing anything to 'influence public opinion'. Browser CEOs aren't newspaper editors or activists, Mitchell Baker excepted.

---

I remember reading news in 2005 saying that Mozilla has established its Corporation subsidiary - and I had a bad feelings about it at that time. And years later we can see the effects - what's the revenue, how browsers market share looks like. Now, every time I'm reading that project, foundation xyz is creating "for profit" branch, subsidiary I know that this most likely won't end well. Profits will go over users needs, wishes each time and those at the project will change as well. It's like a magic wand appears and turns open-minded contributors into some mindless corporate drones with an arrogant attitude.

I want to still like Firefox but in last 14 years Mozilla managed to seriously deteriorate trust in its capabilities of handling their main product. And I also cannot fathom how they managed to screw up promotion of the browser and let Google dominate the market. That didn't happen overnight but Google at some point started to bundle their browser as "additional offer" in almost every software installer for Windows, while Mozilla did nothing similar.

I know what you're saying, I agree, as I worked (in the past) on advertising platforms as well, but both of those statements can be true at the same time.

The open web was built on advertising, but the perverse incentives in advertising are also poisoning the open web.

I don't think we've ever had a good solution. People like free stuff, and also, micro-transactions are not possible given the huge banking fees. What we're seeing, the alternative, are subscription-based services behind closed hardens, and mobile apps whose ads can no longer be blocked, so here we are.

I also think that Google isn't the greater evil, because Google has an incentive to keep the web going. For instance, what happens with local newspapers, when they die, besides depriving ad networks of revenue, is that the audience of these newspapers moves to walled gardens like Facebook. The failure of advertising on the web right now results in more centralisation.

Have you seen the guns that enforce it?

/s

ROT13 was only an example of a step that makes data look "protected" in some way when it really isn't, just like the ineffective means used to anonymize data makes it look safe to sell that data when it really isn't.

There is a lot of research showing how easy it can be to identify an individual using data that has been anonymized. (https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/07/23/134090/youre-ver...)

HIPAA does provide a standard and guidelines for what they call the "de-identification of protected health information" (https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/special-topics/d...) and it includes, for example, a list of specific identifying information that must be removed from the records before they can be sold or otherwise passed around in order to get safe harbor protections. It also includes an option where an "expert" ("There is no specific professional degree or certification program for designating who is an expert") can just say "Trust me bro, it's anonymized".

If somebody was able to buy their re-identified data from a broker and they could prove that was sold by a health provider bound by HIPAA, they would still have to prove that the provider who sold the data had "actual knowledge" that the broker would be able to re-identify the individual, where:

> actual knowledge means clear and direct knowledge that the remaining information could be used, either alone or in combination with other information, to identify an individual who is a subject of the information.

Which all seems like it would be almost impossible to prove unless the provider left obvious identifying information in the data, or if a whistleblower came forward with records of direct communication between the seller and buyer where the buyer was reassured that the data being sold to them would later be able to be re-identified.

Awareness of the fact that we have mountains of research showing that individuals are easy to re-identify from anonymized data doesn't count as "actual knowledge":

> Much has been written about the capabilities of researchers with certain analytic and quantitative capacities to combine information in particular ways to identify health information.32,33,34,35 A covered entity may be aware of studies about methods to identify remaining information or using de-identified information alone or in combination with other information to identify an individual. However, a covered entity’s mere knowledge of these studies and methods, by itself, does not mean it has “actual knowledge”

Which leaves us with healthcare providers who can use methods to "anonymize" data that have been proven to be vulnerable to re-identification, then freely sell that "anonymized" data to third parties with a nudge and a wink.

I'll admit to being pessimistic. We know that the strength of the regulations we have in the US has done little to slow down the buying and selling of our healthcare data.

We've also already seen a lot of very shady behavior by health care providers and companies such as tricking or coercing people into giving up their rights so that they don't even have to pretend to protect their data with anonymization before selling it. (see https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/13/health-... and https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/05/01/amazon-... and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22177812 and https://www.12onyourside.com/story/23852025/on-your-side-ale...)

It is the entire point of DoH indeed, while hiding behind the idea that is somehow prevents the state/ISP from knowing which sites you go to (which it really doesn't).

There only one way to get best of both world:

    - force your browser to never ever use DoH / DoT: force good old, in the clear, DNS over port 53

    - run your own local DNS resolver (I run *unbound*)

    - only ever allow DNS port 53 to/from your machine and your local resolver (I run *unbound* on an old Raspberry Pi)

    - have your DNS resolver use DoH

But you also get full control over which domains can be resolved or not.

As a sidenote unbound supports "wildcards" when blocking domains, which is sweet (as opposed to your typical OS's hosts files, which doesn't support wildcard).

FWIW I've configured unbound to return 0.0.0.0 for the millions (!) of (wildcarded) domains I'm blocking and then I use dnsmasq, locally, to convert any 0.0.0.0 to transform into NXDOMAIN. It's versatile and I like that way.

It's Linux so you set that up once and it works for years.

DNS without DoH, DoT, or DoQ, is wide open to anyone snooping traffic in the raw, that’s not necessarily information you want to share with the world.

You can MITM the traffic, and continue to deliver the traffic using a self signed certificate that you’ve trusted on your mobile device, and boom, you can capture the traffic at your proxy point and be happy.

A lot of mobile apps use certificate pinning to ensure that the backend certificate matches what the app expects. Now your self signed certificate, even though it’s trusted at the OS level, no longer matches the certificate that the app is expecting, and no data is exchanged after TLS handshake fails.

Unfortunately they can, either through the unencrypted hostname passed in SNI or in the cert returned by the server .

However it wasn’t, and it doesn’t defer to the OS or the network. I can’t set a dhcp option on my network to tell my dozens of clients what dns server to use, I have to manually adjust each browser. I additionally get different reaults depending what I use, my browser will contact a different server than any other application.

That’s broken behaviour which benefits AdTech companies like Google.

I don’t have a problem with doing dns lookups over http, or any other protocol you want to use, if I configure my OS resolver to do that.

When people don’t like DoH they tend to mean they have a problem with bypassing the OS.

Theres then the concept of DoH, network admins have a harder job blocking it without MitMing traffic (and in some cases installing new root certificates and thus reducing security for users).

I’m less concerned about that. The argument for DoH often goes to “I don’t trust my network but I do trust Google” but I can see why some don’t trust their network. Personally I’d tunnel all traffic if I were on an untrusted network.

As someone who doesn’t trust Google (as their income comes from selling my personal data against my will) but does trust my network (as I am the network admin) I lean in the “anti DoH” camp, but regardless of which camp, DNS should be configured at the OS level (whether that’s a manual choice to use Google or cloudflare or whatever, or to accept the network hints)